Affordances in the two loops
A quick note here to connect a key idea from complexity work with the two loops model of change that I’ve used essentially as a theory of change in living systems ever since I started working with it back in the Berkana Institute days when we were looking for ways to explain why networks alone weren’t the answer to change work.
Just a warning. This is a theory-heavy post, and I recommend you read the linked papers and blogs to dove deeper.
What is unique about the model pictured above (and click through if you’re reading this on email, as the featured images don’t appear in the email version of these posts) in terms of traditional change models is that the seeds of the new system is indicated as starting within the existing system. Like any living system, the future comes from a connected disruption with the current and the past. An elephant will not produce a codfish as its offspring, nor will a thistle grow from an apple seed. Living things over time can change and be changed by their environments and relationships, but they are more likely to evolve along some lines rather than others. A cod fish and an elephant (and indeed a thistle and an apple tree) may share a common ancestor 1.6 billion years ago, but that ancestor at some point differentiated itself into several Kingdoms and Phyla and Families with different characteristics shaped by the relationships inherent in its environment. Living systems have a history and those histories are carried forward as “affordances.”
I first learned about affordances through the work of Mark O Sullivan and his application of the theory to learning football, a complex sport requiring complex learning strategies. But these ideas have been around for a long time. In ecological psychology, the concept of affordances comes from J.J Gibson and is summarized nicely in this paper by Hugo Letiche and Michael Lissack:
The term “affordance” was first coined by the perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson (1977, 1979); it referred to actionable properties between the world and an actant (person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are relationships. They exist: they do not have to be visible, known or desirable. Affordances entail the possible relationships amongst actors and objects; they are properties of the world. For instance, affordances are what objects or things offer people to be done with them. Affordances are bestowed by the environment. They are what it offers, provides and supplies. Affordances invite activity, reaction and point to possibilities. An affordance is a relationship between something in the world and the intentions, perceptions and capabilities of a person or persons.
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
Affordances are important because, as they say in the paper:
Affordances can bring us from a possibility space to an activity. In the relationships between persons and situations, the move from activity to consciousness and back again, can be co-shared and co-experienced. Affordances are in effect ‘complementary relating contrarieties’, providing the non-dualist logic needed in social complexity studies. One will be drawn out by affordances, made to do thin
— Letiche and Lissack, Making room for affodances
The two loops model of change represents this space as the beginning of the line of the new and the space out of which it emerges. When we are looking for the weak signals of what might be the next state of a system or its replacement, we need to look within the present for the patterns of stability and the patterns of volatility that give us a clue about what to nudge, what to strengthen and what to disrupt. If we want to bring new relationships and patterns of behaviour into being, we can try to interact with these patterns to see which provides the greatest affordance for the direction in which we want to travel.
And so a critical part of using the two loops model is to spend a lot of time occupying that space in the nascent, unformed moment before the new begins to take shape. Study the stories and patterns of behaviour and the desire lines that limit and enable the evolution of the new from the cauldron of the current state of things. Affordances are rarely visible; they can be felt, perceived, apprehended, noticed and worked with. They show up as tendencies, habits, possibilities, opportunities and surprises.
Thank you for writing about affordances!
» Affordances are rarely visible; they can be felt, perceived, apprehended, noticed and worked with. «
It is somewhat ironic that the naming phase seems to so critical, today. I often feel guilty for enciuraging people to think about it, early and persistently, while everybody is still so excited about exploring affordances they simply cannot put a name on, yet (until somebody else does, not with the best intentions). New words emerge among those who work with affordances, but those who want to obstruct that work are much faster with designing detrimental designations. How to handle this?
You don’t name the affordances and then pursue it. They are emergent. You test them out before you name them. You going looking for them. And when you find them, action flows.
I think about the way same sex marriage became fully legal in Canada. There was a court case and several provincial legislatures started changing their laws. When those opposed – the Conservative party in this case – tried to create a federal law to reverse those provincials laws the writing was already on the wall. The affordances had opened wide and was carrying us to marriage equality.
Many decades of simply naming it hadn’t worked and I think this is whole point of this post. You can’t simply name a future and expect it to happen. There is a space between the trajectory of the legacy system and the emergence of the new in which possibilities arise. Keep working relentlessly to find those that offer directionality to your intention. Don’t disagree over tactics. Try everything until you find something that works.
Same sex marriage is an interesting example here, with respect to my country (Germany). The request for it was named “Ehe für alle” (marriage for everybody). Nobody expected that to just happen, but calling it like this proved essential.
Our (conservative-led) governments fought it tooth and nail, until that was no longer possible. During their gradual retreat, they introduced the “eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft” (registered life-partnership), an “almost-marriage” with notable exceptions (negative discriminations). Those discriminations had to be challenged in front of our constitutional court, which found them unconstitutional (violating the principle of equal rights for all humans).
Now that path was an affordance, it’s effectiveness was tied directly to the “everybody” in “marriage for everybody”. In fact referring to that conceptual link by name was essential for success, and also the concept of a “registered life-partnership” had to be fought, by calling it out to expose it for what it was.
The lack of a useful name hurts: take “climate activists”, e.g. In my language, there’s no widely accepted, better term for those engaged here. They have been denounced as “climate terrorists” for blocking roads by glueing themselves onto the asphalt. Subsequently, they’ve been fought via phone tapping, confiscation of property, and preventive custody (yes, that exists, in Germany).
Right now, Germany is seeing so called “farmer protests”, where roads and autobahns get blocked by tractors – yet nobody is calling those activists “terrorists”. After all, who would denounce “protesting farmers” as “terrorists”?
The difference a name makes. And like I said: unfortunately, good names slowly emerge from within those who form a movement, but the denouncing label is designed much quicker by those opposing a different future.
Yes. That brings to mind Lakoff’s framing although his ideas are rusty in my mind at the moment. These are good examples I think of trying to find the affordances that allow us to move from one era to another. It is no surprise that so many cultural stories world wide are about small people finding tiny seams to make change or vanquish their foes. Threading the needle, as it were. The mistake of course is always assuming that one path forward was obvious and all we need to do is find that path and we are all set. It takes thousands of attempts at justice for only one to succeed.
[…] and safe-to-fail work, allowing for learning about what the new system can look like. Before even naming the new systems we can discover the affordances for change that already exist by seeking patterns in the system that are coherent with a preferred intention for change. There […]
Exploring the term I propose what we sometimes call a “life hack” is an affordance brought to bare, usually by a small modification of the environment.
Also interesting the notion that an affordance can be perceived or accessible to one person and not another, for example depending on lived experience or bodily abilities (Jenny L. Davis’ “conditions framework of affordances”).
New lens to me, this. So far worth it!
Chris, thank you! Your exploration of “affordances”, reminds me of Alicia Juarrero’s work on history and context as relevant causal agents of a different kind than the “forceful impacts” of Newtonian physics. She uses the term “enabling constaints”… would be interesting to explore sometime the similarities and differences between the two concepts. And I look forward to following the various links you’ve included… yet
on a more immediately practical level… I’m quite drawn to the conversation in the comments between you and Rolf, on the role of “naming” for nurturing the “seeds of a new system”, the “weak signals” that we can choose to amplify. Here,
my sense of the power of naming, is informed by my experience with Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing process, where we find a “handle” for something that we are felt-sensing. In your blog post, you write, “Affordances are rarely visible; they can be felt, perceived, apprehended, noticed and worked with.”
How we work with the felt-sense of something, includes finding a “handle” for it… a provisional, temporary “name” that can evolve… and what we “do” once we have an initial “handle”, is to check the resonance between it, and the felt sense… a kind of “zig-zag” between the conceptual and the felt-sense… as a way of helping to fine-tune both.
Jumping now to the societal level, the conversation about marriage equality reminds me of the story of how the Mormons were able to decriminalize plural marriages in Utah… they had tried and failed for years, using a “freedom of religion” framing… yet eventually they tried a “free speech” framing, and succeeded by pointing out the contradiction of a person being able to have any number of intimate partners, but if they choose to consider their partners “wives”, the situation was deemed illegal. Interesting example of the power of framing, and of naming…